I do believe God gave that wise angel charge concerning me lest I get dashed, but I just got dashed anyway, and its my own fault, not the angel's. I have suffered this day until I want to lay my face down against the hem of His garment and wait in the dust for Him to pick me up. I shall never be able to do it myself, and how He's going to do it I can't see, but He will.
That dinner-party last night was bad enough, but to-day's been worse. I didn't sleep until long after daylight and then Judy came in before eight o'clock with a letter for me that looked like a state document. I felt in my trembly bones that it was some sort of summons affair from Judge Wade; and it was. I looked into the first paragraph and then decided that I had better get up and dress and have a cup of coffee and a single egg before I tried to read it.
Incidental to my bath and dressing, I weighed and found that I had lost all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those two extra pounds might be construed to prove love, but exactly on whom I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn't even enjoy the thinness, but took a kind of already-married look in my glass and tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down. It was work; and then I took up the judge's letter, which also was work and more of it.
He started in at the beginning of everything, that is at the beginning of the tuberculosis girl and I cried over the pages of her as if she had been my own sister. At the tenth page we buried her and took up Alfred and I must say I saw a new Alfred in the judge's bouquet-strewn appreciation of him, but I didn't want him as bad as I had the day before when I read his own new and old letters, and cried over his old photographs. I suppose that was the result of some of what the judge manages the juries with. He'd be apt to use it on a woman and she wouldn't find out about it until it was too late to be anything but mad. Still when he began on me at page sixteen I felt a little better, though I didn't know myself any better than I did Alfred when I got to page twenty.
What I am, is just a poor foolish woman, who has a lot more heart than she can manage with the amount of brains she got with it at birth. I'm not any star in a rose-colored sky, and I don't want to inspire anybody; it's too much of a job. I want to be a healthy happy woman and a wife to a man who can inspire himself and manage me. I want to marry a thin man and have from five to ten thin children, and when I get to be thirty I want my husband to want me to be as fat as Aunt Bettie, but not let me. An inspiration couldn't be fat and I'm always in danger from hot muffins and chicken gravy. However, if I should undertake to be all the things Judge Wade said in that letter he wanted me to be to him, I should soon be skin and bones from mental and physical exercise. Still, he does live in Hillsboro and I won't let myself know how my heart aches at the thought of leaving my home—and other things. It's up in my throat and I seem always to be swallowing it, the last few days.
All the men who write me letters seem to get themselves wound up into a skyrocket and then let themselves explode in the last paragraph and it always upsets my nerves. I was just about to begin to cry again over the last words of the judge when the only bright spot in the day so far suddenly happened. Pet Buford blew in with the pinkest cheeks and the brightest eyes I had seen since I looked in the mirror the night of the dance. She was in an awful hurry.
"Molly, dear," she said, with her words literally falling over themselves, "Tom says you'll give us some of your dinner left-overs to take for lunch in the Hup, for we are going way out to Wayne County to see some awfully fine tobacco he has heard is there. I don't want to ask mother, for she won't let me go; and his mother, if he asked her, will begin to talk about us. Tom said come to you and you would understand and fix it quick. He said kiss you for him and tell you he said 'Come on in, the water's fine.' Isn't he a joke?" And we kissed and laughed and packed a basket, and kissed and laughed again for good-by. I felt amused and happy for a few minutes—and also deserted. It's a very good thing for a woman's conceit to find out how many of her lovers are just make-believes. I may have needed Tom's deflection.
Anyway, I don't know when I ever was so glad to see anybody as I was when Mrs. Johnson came in the front door. A woman who has proved to her own satisfaction that marriage is a failure is at times a great tonic to other women. I needed a tonic badly this morning and I got it.
"Well, from all my long experience, Molly," she said as she seated herself and began to hem a dish-towel with long steady stabs, "husbands are just stick candy in different jars. They may look a little different, but they all taste alike and you soon get tired of them. In two months you won't know the difference in being married to Al Bennett and Mr. Carter and you'll have to go on living with him maybe fifty years. Luck doesn't strike twice in the same place and you can't count on losing two husbands. Al's father was Mr. Johnson's first cousin and had more crochets and worse. He had silent spells that lasted a week and family prayers three times a day, though he got drunk twice a year for a month at a time. Al looks very much like him."